Recently in Airline Security Category

Capital Games and Gains' Andrew Samwick links to a Wall Street Journal story by Holman Jenkins examining what the recent foiled terrorist attack says about Al Qaeda and our nation's response:

Considering the ease with which a suicide bomber could stroll into a Starbucks in any American city and kill a dozen people, you have to wonder at al Qaeda's obsession with targeting commercial airliners.

If 19 terrorists (the number who carried out the 9/11 attacks) each blew himself up at one- or two-week intervals in a shopping mall or a movie theater, America likely would become a seething nation of paranoid shut-ins. That it hasn't happened tells you something: Al Qaeda doesn't have a ready supply of competent suicide bombers, domestic or imported, to carry off serious attacks. That it continues to pour what little resources it can command into lame airliner attacks, like shoe bomber Richard Reid's failed attempt to blow himself up in 2001 and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's failed attempt on Christmas Day, tells you something else:

Al Qaeda may be incapacitated, but its leaders aren't dumb. So what if their hapless messengers only embarrass themselves and burn their legs? Al Qaeda can still count on the sizeable damage we will inflict on ourselves through an airport security apparatus that specializes in expensive political displays of barn-door closing that seldom have any real security payoff.

The few people who actually remember the fear created by the anthrax attacks or the D.C.-area sniper cannot doubt the potential effectiveness of the strategy Holman outlines.

I think the conclusions Holman reaches about Al Qaeda, our national battle against it, and our domestic security situation, have significant merit. His article is worth reading.

From Urban Cartography, we see that Jesus Diaz has taken Nate Silver's data on airline terrorism over the past decade and put them in graphical form.

FiveThirtyEight.com's Nate Silver does the math.

Therefore, the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000. This means that you could board 20 flights per year and still be less likely to be the subject of an attempted terrorist attack than to be struck by lightning.

The Transportation Security Administration has so far comprehensively failed in its first public test in the aftermath of the attempted bombing of Northwest Flight 253.

Alas, it's just the latest failure in the history of an awful decision to merge a group of agencies in response to the September 11 attacks.

It's not just the pathetic, and all-too-predictable, security theater response (Steve Bruce Schneier has a good initial take-down of this latest round of TSA feel-good-but-not-making-us-any-safer ridiculousness). We need to know how someone about whom there were credible warnings (including from his father) was apparently able to get on a plane to the United States.

Frankly, it's inexcusable. People must be held responsible.

Not letting people use laptops or read books or use the restroom in the last hour of a flight isn't going to make us more secure. The Obama Administration needs to do better. And quickly.

Note: Edited to correct the Bruce Schneier's name above. Thanks for catching that error, ZDR.

Behind on my reading, I only now saw this outstanding post by Bruce Schneier about what should be done to improve airport security. His plan:

This would be my real answer: "Establish accountability and transparency for airport screening." And if I had another sentence: "Airports are one of the places where Americans, and visitors to America, are most likely to interact with a law enforcement officer - and yet no one knows what rights travelers have or how to exercise those rights."

Schneier wants transparency about the no-fly and watch lists. He argues that there should be clear and explicit rules about what passengers can expect from TSA at checkpoints. He calls for "airport security [to] be solely about terrorism, and not a general-purpose security checkpoint to catch everyone from pot smokers to deadbeat dads."

That's an outstanding plan. Sadly, it is hard to imagine much of it being implemented.

Juan Fernando Gómez hasn't done anything wrong, but he gets detained when he travels back into the United States because he's on a Transportation Security Administration list.

He's not sure which one. No one will tell him. There also appears to be no way to get off the list.

As I have written before, I will be quite glad when the incompetant Bush Administration has left office. The Kafkaesque world Gómez faces when he travels is unacceptable.

(Hat tip: Kevin Drum)

The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg has written a must-read article about the state of American airline security. Again, it's not good. As the article summary explains:

Airport security in America is a sham—“security theater” designed to make travelers feel better and catch stupid terrorists. Smart ones can get through security with fake boarding passes and all manner of prohibited items—as our correspondent did with ease.

As security expert Bruce Schnei­er explains, it's really two measures since 9/11 that have made flying more safe. Schneier joined Goldberg on a test of the airport security checkpoint system.

Schnei­er and I walked to the security checkpoint. “Counter­terrorism in the airport is a show designed to make people feel better,” he said. “Only two things have made flying safer: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers.” This assumes, of course, that al-Qaeda will target airplanes for hijacking, or target aviation at all. “We defend against what the terrorists did last week,” Schnei­er said. He believes that the country would be just as safe as it is today if airport security were rolled back to pre-9/11 levels. “Spend the rest of your money on intelligence, investigations, and emergency response.”

Schnei­er and I joined the line with our ersatz boarding passes. “Technically we could get arrested for this,” he said, but we judged the risk to be acceptable. We handed our boarding passes and IDs to the security officer, who inspected our driver’s licenses through a loupe, one of those magnifying-glass devices jewelers use for minute examinations of fine detail. This was the moment of maximum peril, not because the boarding passes were flawed, but because the TSA now trains its officers in the science of behavior detection. The SPOT program—“Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques”—was based in part on the work of a psychologist who believes that involuntary facial-muscle movements, including the most fleeting “micro-expressions,” can betray lying or criminality. The training program for behavior-detection officers is one week long. Our facial muscles did not cooperate with the SPOT program, apparently, because the officer chicken-scratched onto our boarding passes what might have been his signature, or the number 4, or the letter y. We took our shoes off and placed our laptops in bins. Schnei­er took from his bag a 12-ounce container labeled “saline solution.”

“It’s allowed,” he said. Medical supplies, such as saline solution for contact-lens cleaning, don’t fall under the TSA’s three-ounce rule.

“What’s allowed?” I asked. “Saline solution, or bottles labeled saline solution?”

“Bottles labeled saline solution. They won’t check what’s in it, trust me.”

They did not check. As we gathered our belongings, Schnei­er held up the bottle and said to the nearest security officer, “This is okay, right?” “Yep,” the officer said. “Just have to put it in the tray.”

Osama bin Laden shirt? Check. "Beerbelly" device filled with 24 ounces of liquid? Check. Hezbollah flag? No problem. Fake boarding passes anyone with Acrobat Professional could make? Pass right through.

But please remove your shoes and belt. That will be safer.

Bruce Schneier is rightly unimpressed with the new TSA regulations requiring people to cooperate with TSA screeners and not refuse to provide ID.

That's right; people who refuse to show ID on principle will not be allowed to fly, but people who claim to have lost their ID will. I feel well-protected against terrorists who can't lie.

I don't think any further proof is needed that the ID requirement has nothing to do with security, and everything to do with control.

Such control, alas, does not make me feel any safer.

Your latest story from the madness that is our airline security "system" -- those air marshals who are supposed to be on board to protect us from terrorists? Some of them cannot make their flights because they are false positives on the no-fly list.

Can the Bush Administration do anything right?

Actually, we should not be surprised. This is what you get when you elect people who hate government into office so they can ensure our government does not work.

Bruce Schneier has the gory details here.

Matthew Yglesias points us to one of the most sane analyses I have read of the questionable airline security protocols that have been forced on passengers since the September 11 terrorist attacks.

New York Times' Patrick Smith's deserves great credit for this clear-eyed analysis.

Six years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, airport security remains a theater of the absurd. The changes put in place following the September 11th catastrophe have been drastic, and largely of two kinds: those practical and effective, and those irrational, wasteful and pointless.

The first variety have taken place almost entirely behind the scenes. Explosives scanning for checked luggage, for instance, was long overdue and is perhaps the most welcome addition. Unfortunately, at concourse checkpoints all across America, the madness of passenger screening continues in plain view. It began with pat-downs and the senseless confiscation of pointy objects. Then came the mandatory shoe removal, followed in the summer of 2006 by the prohibition of liquids and gels. We can only imagine what is next.

Take, for example, the 3-ounce limit on gels and liquids -- the reason why you cannot carry a bottle of water on the plane, but can pay astronomical prices on water after you pass through the security area.

Among first to express serious skepticism about the bombers’ readiness was Thomas C. Greene, whose essay in The Register explored the extreme difficulty of mixing and deploying the types of binary explosives purportedly to be used. Green conferred with Professor Jimmie C. Oxley, an explosives specialist who has closely studied the type of deadly cocktail coveted by the London plotters.

“The notion that deadly explosives can be cooked up in an airplane lavatory is pure fiction,” Greene told me during an interview. “A handy gimmick for action movies and shows like ‘24.’ The reality proves disappointing: it’s rather awkward to do chemistry in an airplane toilet. Nevertheless, our official protectors and deciders respond to such notions instinctively, because they’re familiar to us: we’ve all seen scenarios on television and in the cinema. This, incredibly, is why you can no longer carry a bottle of water onto a plane.”

The threat of liquid explosives does exist, but it cannot be readily brewed from the kinds of liquids we have devoted most of our resources to keeping away from planes. Certain benign liquids, when combined under highly specific conditions, are indeed dangerous. However, creating those conditions poses enormous challenges for a saboteur.

“I would not hesitate to allow that liquid explosives can pose a danger,” Greene added, recalling Ramzi Yousef’s 1994 detonation of a small nitroglycerine bomb aboard Philippine Airlines Flight 434. The explosion was a test run for the so-called “Project Bojinka,” an Al Qaeda scheme to simultaneously destroy a dozen widebody airliners over the Pacific Ocean. “But the idea that confiscating someone’s toothpaste is going to keep us safe is too ridiculous to entertain.”

There's more, and it is excellent. I doubt it will lead to many changes, but at least someone is casting a rightly skeptical eye at the nonsense being thrown our way at the airport. Just because something is being done, does not mean what is happening is actually improving our security as we fly.

Can someone explain how exactly this makes us any safer? Mother Jones' Diane E. Dees writes:

Sue Clark, M.D., a surgeon in Harrow, England, had a patient with fistula-in-ano who had been treated through surgery. The 48-year-old man had a long-term seton to control sepsis. This particular seton was a length of suture material knotted to form a loop placed into the fistula track. Last August, this patient traveled from England to New York for a vacation. Upon arrival, he was interrogated by immigration officials, and then examined and searched. During the rectal exam, an official yanked hard on the seton, causing the patient severe pain. The patient was told he could not enter the United States unless the seton was removed.

I hope our radical right fear-mongers are proud of the world they are creating. While ignoring real airline security reforms, they've created a climate of fear where lying vigilantes flurish. From the Independent:

To the applause of fellow passengers, the Jewish designer was escorted from a New York flight as a potential bomber. Because, he tells Sophie Goodchild, of his holiday tan.

Another sign that our Republican leadership is not serious about security. The Associated Press' Leslie Miller writes:

The nation's top aviation security official says X-ray images are an effective way to detect bombs in shoes.

A Homeland Security Department study says they aren't.

It's only been nearly five years since the September 11 terrorist attacks and Richard Reid's attempt to use a shoe bomb on December 22, 2001.

Do you feel safer after reading a story like this one? How many more chances are we going to give the Republican Party to play politics with security rather than doing something about it?

(Hat tip: Americablog)

Ah, yes. Good to see we have a handle on airline security. Think Progress points us to a story that would be comical if it were not about such a serious subject. The Associated Press' Leslie Miller reports:

Infants have been stopped from boarding planes at airports throughout the U.S. because their names are the same as or similar to those of possible terrorists on the government's "no-fly list."

It sounds like a joke, but it's not funny to parents who miss flights while scrambling to have babies' passports and other documents faxed.

Ingrid Sanden's 1-year-old daughter was stopped in Phoenix before boarding a flight home to Washington at Thanksgiving.

"I completely understand the war on terrorism, and I completely understand people wanting to be safe when they fly," Sanden said. "But focusing the target a little bit is probably a better use of resources."

But you never know what a 1-year-old could do in President George W. Bush's United States of America.

The headline says it all:

A Dangerous Loophole in Airport Security
If Slate could discover it, the terrorists will too.

This loophole, allows a potential terrorist to bypass the no-fly list by utilizing internet check-in, a program like Microsoft Publisher, and a printer to create a duplicate boarding pass. Read Andy Bowers' story to learn all of the details.

As Bowers explains, closing this loophole would require:

at least one document check station that simultaneously compares all three elements: the boarding pass, a government-issued ID, and the No-Fly List in the airline's computer.

The real question is whether we serious about airline security. The lack of reaction to Bowers' story provides a troubling answer.